Release of Boson 0.11, a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game for the K Desktop Environment.

For this release, the primary focus has been to finally get the release out ;-). For nearly the whole time since the last release in early 2004 both main Boson developers have been too busy with various non-Boson things to concentrate for long enough on an actual release. However during that time period new features got constantly added, so the list of changes is very long for this version.

Probably the most visible change is the port to libufo. libufo (http://libufo.sf.net) is a widget toolkit for OpenGL, that enables Boson to draw buttons, labels and other widgets directly into the OpenGL scene, instead of using a separated area. An installation of libufo is not necessary, as Boson provides its own copy of this library. Note that we still use both, KDE and Qt and will continue to do so. KDE and Qt are used in Boson for a lot of things, not only the GUI.

Another much apparent change is the implementation of realistic looking water. While Boson 0.10 used simply textures only, this release provides a dedicated water engine, even supporting shaders and reflections.

In the technical area, Boson has received an game-event subsystem that makes the game more modular, event driven and will ease the development of an AI. Furthermore a network synchronization protocol has been developed, that allows to detect and even fix out-of-sync errors in network games most of the time.

With this addition, network games are supposed to be fully operational now.

Further changes include:* Many new effects, such as daylight and wind* Much improved pathfinder* Winning conditions* Simple terrain LOD (level of detail)* Flying units have their own moving quirks* Many new neutral models such as trees* Many much less apparent changes

As a special highlight this release features an installer package with a precompiled binary of Boson 0.11. This binary is linked statically against Qt, KDE, and several other libraries, meaning that you do not require an installation of these libraries. This package is still very experimental, however because of the amount of libraries Boson depends on, it is now the recommended way of installing Boson. At the moment there is an installer for 32bit x86 Linux platforms only. It is not known whether it runs on other platforms (non x86 platforms will definitely not work).

RequirementsYou can find a list of hardware and software requirements at